Site appears then disappears from Google

[lobeng77]

Hi, This is my first post to the Moz community. I hope someone can help me, as I'm at my wits end

Since mid to late April, my client's home page keeps dropping from Google rankings on and off on the desktop in incognito and non-incognito browsing. It seems to always be visible on mobile phones though. One day it's on page 4, the next day it's not anywhere to be found (even though some of her other pages rank). The site is here: evgeniaribinik.com

I have done some blog writing (just text) for this client over the last few months, and recently she asked for some SEO help. After looking at her website, I noticed that she had a plugin called WordPress SEO on her site. She wasn't using this for the blogs, however. I don't think she did much of anything with SEO, but she did say that for the last few years, she was always on page 3 or 4 of Google.

In mid/late April, she saw that she wasn't ranking at all for the keyword "boudoir photography nyc" anymore, despite a few years of ranking for it. I told her Yoast would be good to use. However, after she installed it, the same issues keep happening. Right now, she has Yoast and WordPress SEO plugins installed (I'm not sure if this is causing an issue as well). But I really can't figure out why she keeps going on and off page 4.

She also asked me to optimize older blogs that she wrote herself for SEO. When I look at them, they don't have meta descriptions, good titles or good keywords. I realize this is hurting her, but why would her site be fine for years and all of a sudden not now? Thank you in advance for any help you can give me!

Jill

[willcritchlow]

In terms of why things might have changed - if nothing has changed technically on the site, then the most likely reason is simply that one of the sequence of Google algorithm updates targeting quality has impacted the site: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

I wouldn't spend too long trying to work out why it might have changed - and instead would put the energy into improving what you can.

Good luck!

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi Jill,

I do not think you have to remove the plugin, it should not have an impact on the site's organic performance.

Best,

Joe

[lobeng77]

Hi Joel,

Thank you so much for responding to me, and for this great information! I am going to try all of your suggestions. That error you showed me is a plugin that enables her Instagram feed to display. Is this something that I should remove for better SEO?

Thank you very much again!
Jill

[Joe_Stoffel]

Quick follow up, I did also notice that all the alt= tags on the page are empty, I would suggest optimizing each of these. This way Google will have more insight into the content on this page.

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi Jill,

Certainly sounds frustrating. I would recommend finding a way to add text-content to the homepage. With the way this page is set up (all images and no text), Google most likely views this as a blank or thin content page. Here is how Google views the site's homepage.

I did see this snippet of text at the bottom of the 'text-only' version of this page which seems to indicate there is an error, may want to have the dev team take a look. Also, given the very limited amount of crawl-able text on the page, this is not going to help optimize this page for 'photography' related terms.

Text I am seeing on this page "Something is wrong. Response takes too long or there is JS error. Press Ctrl+Shift+J or Cmd+Shift+J on a Mac."

Hope this helps, feel free to follow up with any questions!